Maria McKee – I Like To Use Traditional Elements And Mix Them Up In A Modern Way

ND: You’re also the kind of artist who has a small but dedicated base of fans swapping live recordings, cover versions and outtakes. Are you aware of people who talk passionately about your great lost unreleased songs?

MM: I go on the website forum every once in a while to see what the fans are saying, and I like that they are into the minutiae of it all because I’m obsessive/compulsive and I’m a collector, I understand it. It’s been a long time since I’ve been a real bootleg-buying music fan, but I remember somebody gave me this John Cale tape from the Paradiso in Amsterdam and I lived by that. It was him on acoustic and piano and it was insane, one of the most transformational pieces of music I’ve ever had in my possession. So it’s great to have all the colors. I don’t mind the bootlegs.

ND: Among your fans, Life Is Sweet is certainly the divisive album as far as opinions.

MM: I don’t want to paint by numbers. I don’t want to be the critic’s darling that makes the same record every year. I want to stir things up a bit. That’s why I really stand behind some of those influences that are a little iffy, like the musical theater and unironic disco elements. I genuinely love that music. But I’m not an idiot. I know it is going to turn some people off if I sing, “When I’m dead, I’ll be discovered.”

Look, when I sit down to play that song, I mean it. I’m singing those lyrics and it’s coming from my heart. But when I sit down and listen to the record, I [can see that] some journalist is really gonna have fun with this one. But I’m like, “Yeah, bring it on.” I want it to feel like something. I’m not interested in mass acceptance. I think that would be a really scary place to be. I wouldn’t know where to turn. My greatest fear is to have lost it and not know it — to be making music that’s just fine and everybody likes.

VI. “I’M LAWRENCE OF ARABIA AND THIS IS MY HAREM”

ND: Besides the Dixie Chicks, has anyone else been covering your songs?

MM: Being a songwriter who gets their songs covered is a full-time job. It’s like that factory thing where you have to keep writing and writing. I do have some songs that I gave to Wynonna Judd, one called “Trophy Girl”. It’s a cool-rockin’ country song about a guy who wants a trophy girl to spend all his money and take him out. It’s a feminist thing that would be good for her. But I don’t really write for people. It’s just kinda lucky when it happens.

ND: That Dixie Chicks cover might be a bill-payer for a lifetime.

MM: Yeah, I hope so. You never know. I sang with them at Lilith Fair a few years ago, but the whole Lilith Fair thing kinda gave me the heebie-jeebies. They asked me to come down and sing. I was dressed like Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo. My Tom Wolfe look: White linen suit and a Panama hat.

ND: Sounds like Hannibal Lecter at the end of Silence Of The Lambs.

MM: Right, exactly (laughs). I thought, if I’m going to Lilith Fair I’m gonna dress drag. So I had this whole Truman Capote look going on, and they had these special outfits that Todd Oldham had made for them that were like belly-dancing costumes, all sequins and hippy. I got up onstage in my white linen outfit and I said, “I’m Lawrence of Arabia and this my harem” (laughs). I never heard from them again.

ND: One of my favorite recordings of yours is the cover of Victoria Williams’ “Opelousas” from the Sweet Relief tribute album.

MM: Vic is a national treasure. She’s like a cousin to me. I was playing in a band with my brother and they had a guitar player who used to play up in Toronto with Bruce Palmer and the Buffalo Springfield guys. He would talk about this girl that he thought was the greatest singer since Billie Holiday. He dragged me to the Troubadour when I was 16 and it was Vic! She did “Opelousas” that night. And she became part of the family. She’d bake pecan pie and bring it over for Thanksgiving. She taught me my first chords on the guitar.

ND: I assumed you met her ten years later in life.

MM: No — in fact Lone Justice, when it originally started, was me, Ryan Hedgecock and Victoria. We didn’t have the name Lone Justice yet, but it was our band. We were just messing around playing acoustic and then one day we all looked at each other and said, “Let’s do our own thing.”

VII. ONE OF THOSE SONGS THAT HAS BIG PLANS FOR ITSELF

ND: Why did you choose to re-record “Life Is Sweet” and “Afterlife” for this album?

MM: It’s one of those things. I thought if Geffen is gonna shelve that record, I want more people to hear this song because it’s my favorite song I ever wrote [“Life Is Sweet”].

ND: It cries out to be the last song playing over the final scene of a movie that’s gonna win an Oscar.

MM: Yeah. This is one of those myth-making stories that may or may not be true, but I have a friend who knows Sean Penn. He gave Sean a copy of “Life Is Sweet”, and apparently he freaked out and wrote a script that night based on the song (laughs). I have a hunch it might be true because the last time I saw him he was very shy and he came up to me and begged me for a copy of the song. I think it is one of those songs that has big plans for itself. I just thought I gotta do another version and if it doesn’t see its potential this time, we’ll do it again on the next record. The time it took me to write it is the time it took me to sing it the first time. It was one of those gifts from God that just came down on wings. They don’t always do that.